"Now here's something you'll really like!" - Rocket J. Squirrel
Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: Season 1 DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
In February of 1958, writer/producer Jay Ward and his partner Bill Scott began work on an animated pilot called Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Told in the cliffhanger style of old movie serials, the show follows the adventures of Rocket J. ("Rocky") Squirrel and his pal, Bullwinkle J. Moose. The two natives of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota are the best of friends, but they make an odd pair. Rocky is the brain of the duo, zipping from place to place to solve any problems that might come up. Many of the problems are caused by the not-so-bright Bullwinkle. His mere presence guarantees that trouble is just around the corner.
The duo's main adversaries are Pottsylvanian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. Rocky and Bullwinkle always unwittingly stumble into situations that attract the interest of these spies. Boris is a master of disguise, but even the Cold War's best spy training cannot protect him from Bullwinkle's inept bumbling, which often saves the lumbering moose and his squirrel friend from danger.
It took the pair eight months to drum up interest from the networks and advertisers, with General Mills finally coming aboard as the show's sponsor. The show, now re-titled Rocky and His Friends, joined ABC's weekday afternoon lineup in the fall of 1959. The series ran in that timeslot for two seasons before jumping networks and joining NBC's primetime schedule. This move saw another title change - The Bullwinkle Show. After a year in primetime, Bullwinkle moved to NBC's Sunday afternoon lineup. Over the next decade, reruns of the series jumped back and forth between ABC and NBC, running as late as 1981 on the latter network.
Rocky and Bullwinkle face two main adventures in their first season. The first, "Jet Fuel Formula," unfolds in a whopping forty segments over twenty episodes. While trying out his grandma's secret recipe for fudge cake, Bullwinkle accidentally creates a fuel powerful enough to take man to the moon. Boris and Natasha, the U.S. government, and moon-men Cloyd and Gidney want the secret formula. The problem is that the recipe was partially destroyed in Bullwinkle's kitchen fiasco. The measurements remain, but the ingredients have been burned away, and of course the forgetful moose cannot remember what he put into the cake.
Their second adventure, "Box Top Robbery," is told in twelve segments over six episodes. This hard-hitting tale dares to tell the truth about global economy. Gold and silver are meaningless - box tops are the real basis of our currency. Rocky and Bullwinkle are charged with stopping nogoodnik Boris' box top counterfeiting ring.
Each episode of Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends opens and closes with a serialized cliffhanger segment of the main Rocky & Bullwinkle adventure. The remaining portion of the episode consists of two or three rotating regular segments. "Peabody's Improbable History" is hosted by Mr. Peabody, the world's smartest dog. After graduating from college at age three, Mr. Peabody retired to his lab to use his doggie logic to solve scientific problems that confounded mere men. He grew lonely, however, and decided that what he needed was a pet boy, so he adopted red-headed Sherman. Knowing that an apartment is no place to raise a boy (boys need plenty of room to run around), Mr. Peabody built the Waybac machine, a time machine that allows he and his charge to visit historical figures like Napoleon, King Arthur, P.T. Barnum, and Alfred Nobel. Sherman gets his exercise, learns about history, and helps Mr. Peabody nudge history in the right direction.
"Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties" follows the adventures of the titular Canadian law enforcer as he ineptly battles the evil Snidley Whiplash. One particularly amusing segment has Do-Right pitted against "Stokey the Bear," a former anti-fire spokesman turned weenie-roasting firebug under Whiplash's tutelage.
"Fractured Fairy Tales" takes a cracked look at classic (and not so classic) fairy tales, while "Aesop and Son" relates cautionary tales that lead to pun-filled morals. Bullwinkle himself hosts several stand-alone segments, including the poetry romp "Bullwinkle's Corner" and the dubiously useful how-to of "Mr. Know-It All."
The incredible thing about Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends is the fact that it is funny on so many levels. Although it mostly ran in timeslots aimed at kids, the show never talks down to its audience. Yes, much of the humor is based on groaningly bad puns and other inspired silliness, but the show is also sophisticated in its storytelling techniques and its choice of subject matter. With its bitingly satiric takes on the space race, the cold war, world economics and the like, adult audiences in 1959 could tune in along with their kids and laugh at the jokes that the children could not begin to understand. For a forty-five year old show, Rocky has not dated one bit. If anything, time has simply added another layer of enjoyment. Kids and adults can still watch this show together and laugh and the same things their 1950s counterparts found amusing, but now adults have the added fun of looking at the show as it relates to its historical context.
The show's sunny, goofball humor is accentuated by its incredible vocal talent. Producer and writer Bill Scott provides the voices of Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, and Mr. Peabody. June Foray voices both Rocky and Natasha, while Paul Frees handles Boris. Just as important to the tone of the show are the narrators - Edward Everett Horton for "Fractured Fairy Tales" and William Conrad for the main Bullwinkle segments. Narration plays a major role in Rocky, and it is hard to imagine that the show would be as funny without the voices of Everett Horton and Conrad.
While it is commendable that Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends is being preserved on DVD, there are a few problems with this set that may annoy both novices and purists alike. The first is a minor quibble. Since the show has been broadcast under several different names over the years, it was decided that for this DVD release the series would be dubbed "Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends." This has led to the sometimes clumsy superimposition of the new title onto preexisting opening credits and interior bumpers. In most sequences it is barely noticeable, and many viewers will probably not be bothered by this at all, but in some sequences, the editing is jarring.
Over the past ten years or so, almost every major television network and cable channel has begun to run a transparent channel logo on the bottom right hand corner of the television screen. This was started to help maintain viewers' channel awareness in a time when the number of available channel options was mushrooming. This marketing tool is annoying, but viewers have become accustomed to what now seems like a permanent addition to the television screen. This leads us to a bigger flaw in this DVD set: someone inexplicably decided to run an "R&B" logo for approximately five seconds at the start of each segment in the show. What is the point of this unnecessary intrusion? Viewers of the DVD have knowing purchased or rented it and therefore do not need to be reminded of the fact that they are watching Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends. Hopefully this will be dropped from future releases. (Note to DVD producers: Crawls have become distractingly ubiquitous on TV newscasts. Do not add those either.)
The twenty-six episodes that make up season one are divided onto four discs. Each of the four discs are decorated with a portrait of one of the gang - Rocky on disc one, Mr. Peabody on disc two, Snidley Whiplash on disc three, and Natasha on disc four. The four discs are housed in a digipak colorfully decorated with all of the characters from the show. A folder in the digipak holds a booklet, and the digipak itself slides into an equally colorful cardboard sleeve.
The menus are simple to navigate. After a brief animated sequence involving Bullwinkle, a tub of water, and falling balls, the menu options appear. Viewers can choose to play all of the episodes, to choose individual episodes, or to go to the audio setup menu. Upon choosing the "Select Show" option, one of the show's animated interstitials takes the viewer to a screen listing the episode numbers. Choosing an individual episode number brings up that episode's menu. One of the Bullwinkle gang accompanies a listing of the segments in the show, each of which corresponds to a chapter stop. These screens also contain a link to the previous and subsequent episodes, allowing viewers to surf the episodes to look for favorite segments.
